homemade experimental music by Hal McGee and friends 1982 to 2018​Click on the HAL CATALOG tab above to see a list of pages for my 300+ albums.​​Each album's page includes a link to the album's Bandcamp page, where you can purchase downloads.​Info on how to purchase CDRs and Cassettes can be found here.

WoG 0001 - Walls of Genius

The original incarnation, Walls Of Genius spits its foaming drivel upon the innocent world… This music comes up from the bottom of the Id, all the way from the Brown Cloud to the Tar Stained Paradise, witless ravings, a full portion of true mind boggling idiocy -- Walls Of Genius is many things and this tape is Walls Of Genius, folk, punk, psychedelia, rock'n roll, avant-garde, you name it! Jazz even… Well, we don't mean to brag, but even the dogs sing when Walls Of Genius goes on your stereo… WALLS OF GENIUS includes "I'm Eighteen", "Boulder's Burning", "Wild West Africa", "Secret Agent Man", and many more! - from one-sheet WoG catalog list (7-27-83)90 minutes cassette, recorded March 1983.Originally issued with liner notes sheet (see below).Catalog number was assigned Summer 1983.and cassette j-card cover art (pictured here, to the right) was added later.

Evan Cantor: For whatever reason, I knew how to play this song (original by Alice Cooper). I liked Alice Cooper a lot when I was in high school and still think very highly of the School’s Out album. Haven't listened to the others in many years, but I owned several of them back in the day (Love It To Death, etc) and they're probably pretty darn good. Anyway, I'm playing the signature riff on a heavy fuzzed guitar and Ed is channeling screaming heavy metal lead for this. His intro is almost note-for-note with the Alice Cooper version. We deviate very quickly, however. This was likely the first time that Ed and I instructed David to sing—"here's the lyrics, you sing it"—we were obviously fascinated at this point by David's unique approach or lack of such as the case may have been, because there are several examples of this dynamic on the "original Walls Of Genius". This is heavy-metal folk music, just the three of us with bass and mania overdubbed afterwards. It goes into the first of several extended endings, which morphs into crazed mania and a new, alternative jam section with a lot of craziness happening, making good use of the 4-track here to create a frenzied atmosphere. I start in with a chant, "Eighteen, eighteen, eighteen, eighteen…" and then we return to the main theme again before going into one more crazed extended ending. Note the use of extended endings to evolve into new patterns. Neil Young has been doing this in recent years at his concerts, but instead of morphing into new rhythmic patterns, he just morphs into atonal non-rhythmic noise. I experienced this in person in 2012 at Red Rocks. The first couple of instances were interesting, but eventually we got to a point where our response was "enough already, play a damn song, Lord knows you've got plenty of them in your catalog… and the frickin' tickets were $90 each…" This crossed my mind because it took him many years to get around to doing what we were already doing in the 80s.... and I think WoG did it in a more interesting way.Little Fyodor: "I'm Eighteen" probably kicked off our ridiculous sixties era cover song shtick. Evan just stuck a microphone and the lyrics to Alice Cooper's "Eighteen" in front of me and commanded me to sing, and "sing" I did. Nothing was discussed regarding what was "expected." I just went for it, doing whatever felt right (or "wrong"!) at the time. Listening now, it seems I was kinda straddling the line between parodying the song in terms of what it was actually about on one hand and just utter absurdity on the other!

Malcolm's Chant by Excitable Dogs

EC: The chant was "Om Pane Mane Om", which was introduced to me by Malcolm Barr when he was my room-mate at the Charlottesville TKE House (Univ of Va), in 1977, before I got a room of my "own" at the house. Malcolm and I would occasionally perform this chant and others in the house called it "that stupid chant". Here David and I have overdubbed contrapuntal chanting parts, equal parts chanting and equal parts hooting, hollering and going apeshit. There are some voice effects, likely run through a guitar amp. Sounds like a whistle or ocarina made it in there, too. Finally, towards the end, the dogs (Moggs & Amber) join in. We were particularly excited that we were able to energize the dogs and get them involved, although that was probably a happy accident.LF: The funny thing about "Malcolm's Chant" is that we were originally going for something kinda meditative by chanting this Eastern sounding chant that Evan got from a mutual friend in college (whose family had lived in various foreign countries throughout his upbringing). But then after we had been doing this chant a couple of minutes, Natasha's dogs began inexplicably barking! Something about the two of us chanting this ostensibly meditative chant got them excited! You can hear us cracking up toward the end of the original chant. Then we just overdubbed anything ridiculous on top of that.

Streets Of Baltimore by Excitable Dogs

EC: This was one of the songs in my "straight" repertoire. I learned it off of Gram Parsons’ GP album, one of my old favorites. I don’t recall why or how we decided to play this off of "Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines" and army marching chants, but I’m glad we did. I sang a deadpan hillbilly version while David marched away in the background, working up to "Heil Two Three Four! Heil Two Three Four!". Somehow the juxtaposition of the country song and critical mocking of the military worked. It strikes me as timelessly relevant, especially to the current state of affairs in the American political climate. This track works as a critique of redneck America’s love affair with war as the solution to everybody’s problems, with the obsession over guns and American exceptionalism. If only we had had Sarah Palin to mock in 1983! This is my favorite track on the entire cassette.LF: I think we started doing the "Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines" chant to see if the dogs would start barking again! This latter chant was taken from some military commercial we'd seen on TV. All of this was Evan's idea, as well as to overdub his rendition of "The Streets of Baltimore" on top of the latter chant....

The Worker's Beer by Vegetables Behind The Wheel

EC: Actually titled "The Man That Waters The Workers' Beer", by Paddy Ryan, to the tune of "Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech". We had never heard this song before, but we would sometimes pore over The Folksinger's Wordbook (compiled and edited by Irwin and Fred Silber) to find lyrics. I had the book dating back to the Folk Grass Blues Band in Charlottesville, Virginia (1979) when we played some of the songs in the book. Ed is singing this, modified through a guitar amp. I have established the bass line and Ed's guitar is set up to sound like steel drums. After a while, you hear me hollering in the background, “Beer! Beer!” Sounds like David on the slide whistle. There is more chanting and dogs barking into the fadeout.LF: I don't think any of us knew what "The Workers' Beer" sounded like. Ed had it in a song book he had, and he probably just read/sang the lyrics from that. I don't think any attempt was made to read the music! Though, that's just my guess as I was just going along with whatever those two did, adding some vocals and percussion. I remember Ed tried to talk Evan into putting effects on his bass, he thought the bass sounded too clean, but Evan wouldn't do it, so you can hear the clean bass amidst all the noisy madness Ed and me were making, though mostly Ed! At some point it occurred to me that while I thought Mikal Belan was the "noisy" guitarist and Ed the clean sounding guitarist in Rumours of Marriage, my image of Ed's sound changed during WoG as he was then getting into making all sorts of noise on his guitar! Probably using his echoplex and what sounds to me now like a flanger....

Wild West Africa by Vegetables Behind The Wheel

EC: The only thing that makes this "African" is Ed's kalimba. My voice is coming through a guitar amp with effects, singing "bury me not on the lone prairie". Likely these lyrics came from the Folksingers' Wordbook. It settles down to a kalimba riff with the vocals mixed way low, "trail of the buffalo…" Most of the vocals are unintelligible. A backwards tape comes in, the result of using old 2-track tape on a 4-track machine, another happy accident. I mix it in and out, up and down while you hear me singing about the prairie again. I start chanting ''don't bury me with a buffalo" in a nice baritone, which establishes a new rhythm, like a bass line. My mournful harmonica comes in at the end, reprising some western themes.LF: I played Ed's kalimba and a slide whistle on "Wild West Africa". I guess the title refers to Evan singing cowboys songs while I played the African instrument. As the liner notes say, "ambient music at its silliest"!! I wonder if we put Ed's echoplex on the vocal mike to get that echo effect I'm hearing? Just doing anything and everything at our disposal!

I Hate Snow and Willin' by Crooning Goons

EC: "I Hate Snow" is just a snippet of Ed expressing his opinion that we somehow managed to capture on tape. "Willin'" was another song from my "straight" repertoire. In fact, "Willin'" was one of the earliest songs I ever learned to play on the guitar (the first was John Denver's “Country Roads”). My mother once asked me if "Willin'" was about marijuana. "Yeah, I think so…". This is another example of putting David up to sing the lead vocals. We used overdub magic to put lead guitar on it and whistling solos, amongst other maniacal things. After a solo, you hear me repeating in a strong vibrato, a la Jello Biafra, "I'll Be Willin'" and David comes in with the last verse, also adopting the vibrato. A magnificent Fyodor vocal performance with nice growling by Evan egging him on.LF: Ed had been bitching about the snow and Evan thought he was funny so got him to repeat what he had been saying for the microphone.... One night or day me and Evan were hanging out and I sure don't remember why but I started singing "Willin'" with this uber vibrato, and Evan started cracking up and said we should record the song with me doing that! I don't know if the final product came out as funny as it seemed originally. I do see that the sheer utter absurdity of it is eliciting some laughter from me right now! It was pretty tough for me to keep that shit up through the whole song! I kinda got away from it and did something else for the very last two syllables "MOOO-ving" and Evan thought it sounded like Jaime Brockett and started calling me Little Jaime for a while..... Y'know a friend once told me that WoG was the opposite of Jandek, cause he sang kinda normal while his playing was all fucked up....

EC: Ed has always had an interest in Brazilian guitar and has been threatening to teach himself more of it for years. We may have had the lyric in my old "Real Book". I had one dating to the Mystic Knights Of The Sea (1979) when I played rhythm guitar in a guitar-saxophone duet. On vocal tunes, I would often write in the lyrics on the sheet music although at the time it was all I could do to play the chords, much less sing at the same time. On this track, Ed is playing the rhythm guitar and I'm singing the lead in multiple silly voices. I probably dubbed the bass on the track later. David is singing soprano “la-la's” in the background. There is some mouth percussion, some popping noises. My Johnny Rocco voice comes in at one point, asking "why should she look at me?". The track devolves into a jam with lots of scat singing. LF: Ed knew how to play "The Girl From Ipanema", so we did it! That's how most of these cover songs came about. Ed and/or Evan knew a song, so we'd do it! I played this one on my radio show and someone called and said it sounded like a chorus of Wild Man Fischer's! That's especially impressive considering there were only two of us! The hoarse falsetto "la la la's" you hear are me during the original recording. I believe Evan overdubbed his lead vocals.

Duelin' With Duane/But I'm Happy Anyway by Spazz Attack

EC: The first section has Ed playing rhythm and Evan doing lead guitar.My lead guitar is almost humorous because I’m such a poor lead player.The progression is loosely based on "Stormy Monday", so the title is a nod to the Allman Brothers Band whose version of that song is killer.David is scat singing and I come in with "I’m sick with the blues", then "I’ve got a disease called the blues, but I’m happy anyway!"It segues out of the blues into discordant mania, with me playing some slide guitar and David still scat singing.You hear me chanting "I’ve got happiness in my soul".Ed picks up with a Hendrix-y riff and I chime in with a powerful choppy rhythm line.We jam on the new pattern, then return to yet another blues progression, while David continues scat singing.We fade out on yet another blues pattern.LF: Some kiddie's TV show I watched as a kiddie, either Soupy Sales or a local NY area show called the Sandy Becker show (the original publisher of OP Magazine was a Becker, and when I questioned him, it turned out they were related!), had the host talking to a "dog" who seemed to be on the other side of the camera and the "dog" would reply in this very de-nasal voice uttering supposedly dog like sounds. Or at least that's how I remember it. Anyway, I was kind of channeling this de-nasal "dog" voice when I vocalized my parody of the blues here on "Duelin' With Duane". How could one not be a "genius" when one was spontaneously scat singing like a drunken retard without any knowledge of melody or pitch? Y'know, I've told interviewers that one of the goals of Little Fyodor was to express my depression and unhappiness but in a way that was fun and funny rather than the bummer it would be if I just expressed it straightforwardly. I never consciously considered that for WoG, but that sentiment might have come out at times, including in this take on "the blues".....

Boulder's Burning by Spazz Attack

EC: Hey, somebody here wrote a real song! It’s not just an impromptu jam! This is my composition. My rhythm guitar throbs threateningly, a la the James Bond Theme and then it "explodes" into a riff loosely based on a part I wrote for a Blitz Bunnies song (1979), "Billy’s Birthday Surprise", itself originally adapted from the Secret Agent Man head-riff. I do some "hi-yeh" chanting in the background, a nod to my interest in things Native American.LF: Evan had a riff and Ed played along with it and I vocalized along with it. When Evan's riff rose in intensity, so did Ed's and my improvised accompaniments, and it became "Boulder's Burning". All done in one take, betcha couldn't tell! The funniest thing about this song is that Evan edited out my uttering of "your mother sucks cock in hell"! Never let it be said that WoG had no standards!!

March Of The Lost Worm-souls by Spazz Attack

EC: This is a revisiting of the impromptu version with the same name on the Johnny Rocco recording. I don't know if I'm using the same chords that David played on that version. Mine are the first two chords of an intro to a blues progression that I knew. But instead of hitting the progression, I just keep hitting those two chords. Once again, we've got David reading my lyrics. My wailing wormsoul noises in the background ("no no no! ahhh! feh! feh!") are improvised responses to the text as David is reading it. They may have been overdubbed, it's hard to say. I intone the final line with no accompaniment.LF: Evan wrote lyrics to the title he gave to the jam we did previously (in the Johnny Rocco sessions). My liner notes only call this "March of the Lost Worm-Souls" but I remembered it having the tag, "Revisited" at the end. I read Evan's spiel while Evan played the two diminished chords a half step from each other that I had played for the original jam (though with more fluidity and variations than I could muster!) and Ed played his leads along with it. Evan overdubbed percussion and background vocals and harmonica later. I believe I read this for the microphone without ever having looked at all at the poem beforehand. (Evan's kicker at the end was done live).

South Boulder Creek by Ed'n Evan

EC: As the liner notes indicate, Ed and I played along with a tape I made of South Boulder Creek which was right in the backyard of the Eldorado Springs house. I start out using the volume knob on the bass to create a rhythmic rumbling. This was a trick I first starting doing towards the end of the Rumours Of Marriage and Couch Dots sessions. This is very subdued for this generation of Walls of Genius music. We hear the creek and a flanger-bass line emerges. There's some nice kalimba stuff, it could have been either of us playing it. A recorder solo comes in, obviously overdubbed by Evan. Ed’s guitar comes on the rise, with the Echoplex and the bass line carries on. As the jam winds down, there are a bunch of swooping bass chords utilizing the volume knob effect. The creek is mixed up so you can hear it clearly and then the track cuts off.

Secret Agent Man by Sgt. Joe Colorado

EC: This was another song in my "straight" repertoire. I had worked up a finger-picking arrangement of the distinctive head-riff. I was playing an open stage on Monday nights in those days at Pachamama’s coffee house on Pearl Street (subsequently Attusso's restaurant and now L'Atelier, a fancy joint). After the sensitive artists would do their sensitive thing, I would come on and play pop dance songs in a hoppin’ rockabilly style, partly tongue-in-cheek. I performed as "Joe Colorado" and a bunch of people there got to know me as "Joe" as a result. This is me only, overdubbed on the 4-track and it treads the fine line between straight and crazed.

Description of WoG 0001Walls Of Genius from Walls Of Genius Catalogue No. 1, The Mark Of The Moron, Late Summer 1983.

Hal McGee:When I traded cassettes with you in the mid-1980s I thought Walls Of Genius was the name of your band. The first cassette in the Walls Of Genius catalog (WoG 0001), which was originally released in 1983, is listed as “Walls Of Genius”.Evan Cantor:The name Walls of Genius (WoG) first appeared as the title of a cassette. It was a loving tribute to the band Wall of Voodoo. David Lichtenberg reports that I was fond of the expression "he's a genius!", which I apparently used in referring to various football players who appeared to defy the laws of physics. I don't remember this, but it's certainly possible. The tape "Walls of Genius" included a number of "faux" bands.